Buff Briefs | Target targets freshmen

The University of Colorado at Boulder freshman class will be treated to an exclusive Target after-hours shopping event as part of the university’s Welcome Week festivities. On Tuesday, Aug. 17, students in the class of 2014 are invited to board a Target bus that takes them directly to the local Target store for a private instore shopping event. Students who are away from home for the first time can stock up on back-to-college items.

The University of Colorado at Boulder has joined about two dozen other institutions of higher education in an open letter to publishers of campus sustainability rankings, providing guidelines for consistent, comparable and commensurate metrics to size up “green” colleges and universities.

The move comes in response to the growing popularity of sustainability report cards found in collegiate guides published by Peterson’s, Kaplan, The Princeton Review and others.

In addition to CU-Boulder, signatories to the letter include Columbia University, Emory University, Johns Hopkins University, New York University and Stanford.

“Sustainability rankings have prompted a productive dialogue between schools across the country, serving as a learning tool for administrators and students,” said Frank Bruno, vice chancellor for administration. “We want to expand on the informational benefit of these rankings by ensuring institutions have an even playing field to work with and thus can set and reach their goals as efficiently as possible.”

In the past year, CU was named the top “green” school in the nation by Sierra magazine and among the top 15 “green” schools by the Sustainable Endowments Institute, a project of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.

CU-Boulder, along with many other institutions, actively gauges its progress on sustainability strategies using the Sustainability Tracking, Assessment Rating System, or STARS, which was developed by the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education. Data from the self-reporting system will be released by CU-Boulder later this year.

For more information on the STARS system visit http://stars.aashe.org.

Study: State economy growing

For the first time in three years, Colorado business leaders are predicting solid growth in the state economy, according to the most recent quarterly Leeds Business Confidence Index, or LBCI, released by the University of Colorado at Boulder Leeds School of Business.

The LBCI for the third quarter of 2010 posted a reading of 54.8, up from 51.7 last quarter. Five of the six index components recorded moderate gains and one remained flat. Business leaders surveyed remained cautious about the outlook for the national economy, according to Leeds School economist and Business Research Division Director Richard Wobbekind, who conducts the quarterly survey.

The Business Research Division surveyed more than 1,000 business leaders across all sectors in Colorado and received 268 responses, which is about the average for the quarterly survey, said Leeds researcher Brian Lewandowski, who compiles the survey results for the index. An index of 50 is neutral. An index greater than 50 indicates positive expectations, while an index of less than 50 indicates negative expectations.

“The greatest point of optimism is that business leaders expect increased investment in labor and capital for the third quarter,” Wobbekind said. “Investment and employment are two important components that will help bring us out of the recession. Now that business leaders are expecting these to increase, we think that things are looking up in Colorado.”

Business leaders’ sales expectations for the third quarter were strong at 59.4, with more than 51 percent of respondents saying they expect sales to increase in the third quarter, while about 35 percent believe sales will stay about the same. Only 14.2 percent expect a decline for their third quarter sales prospects, Lewandowski said.